Winging along at an altitude somewhere between the Bluebird of Happiness and the Chicken of Depression... random esoterica from writer Chad Love celebrating the joys of fishing, hunting, books, guns, gundogs, music, literature, travel, lonely places, wildness, history, art, misanthropy, scotch and the never-ending absurdity of life.

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Each and every Christmas, my wife, as one of those recurring holiday jokes, buys me the exact same gift: a calendar of the trout of North America. And although meant as a gag, it's actually a pretty neat gift that I enjoy much more than say, a tie. The calendar gives me 12 excellent paintings and a brief history of various trout species, subspecies, or strains, all of which I enjoy reading about, even if I will never be given an opportunity to fish for many of them

So today I finally got around to turning the page over to the current month (yes, I'm a little late), and for my March salmonid edification, I was greeted by a very nice rendition of a new-to-me piscatorial dandy called the Pennask Lake rainbow trout, which as you might deduce, is a strain of rainbow unique to Pennask Lake, which, according to the calendar, is in British Columbia (see, the things you learn...)

At any rate, this Pennask Lake rainbow, while not a particularly large strain of trout, possesses some admirable fighting qualities that once, a long time ago, greatly impressed a visiting sport...

(from the text...)

In 1927, James Drummond Dole, the "Pineapple King" traveled to a remote lake in British Columbia with the promise of hard-fighting rainbow trout for his fly rod. Dole was not disappointed and claimed the lake was "nearest to being the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, of any lake seen or heard of."

Dole, so enamored of these rare, hard-fighting Pennask Lake rainbow trout, did what any self-respecting tycoon would do when faced with something precious and beautiful and unique: he used his wealth and power to take it for himself and keep anyone else from enjoying it. Unless, of course, they had the proper cash and social standing to afford the experience.

The American industrialist and sportsman quickly set about to purchase the majority of the land surrounding the lake and established an exclusive sporting club, the Pennask Lake Fishing and Gaming Company.

Now why does that sound familiar? Why does it seem so, hell, I don't know, prescient, contemporary, even? Like there's something eerily similar playing out across the public lands of the United States right now, with wealthy and powerful interests casting a covetous eye at our public resources, our public lands, our public treasures, our public birthrights, and exclaiming - like the old Pineapple King himself when he first laid eyes on Pennask Lake - that such treasures are "nearest to being the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow." Surely not, right?

Greed and shitassery are the feedback loop that drives the great bulk of human history, its only constant, the shining north star that has guided and goaded eons worth of sorry jackasses across history's ever-shifting dunes. Empires and nations rise and crumble. Movements flare brightly, then fade to black, then flare into something else. Prevailing attitudes wax, wane, evolve, devolve, and shift in the howling winds of vagary, but the one great truth of human existence is there's always going to be some greedy shitass trying to take your rainbow and your pot of gold for himself, even if that rainbow and gold rightfully belong to all of us.

Who knew you could learn so much from a Christmas gag-gift calendar about obscure fish?

Phillip, I owe you several blog comments I meant to leave on your blog, but I've literally (well, almost literally) not been on the computer since I wrote this blog and am behind on responding to both comments on here and blogs I read. Having a real job really sucks...

Hi Chad: Ontario Honker here. Just thought I'd let you know my Lab, Pearl (a.k.a. the Wonderdog) passed on March 10 at age ten years. I'm sure you recall her from your days as a F&S gun dog editor. She beat terminal brain cancer (100% recovery) and autoimmune disease that attacked her bone marrow, but she was finally defeated by kidney disease. We still had a great hunting season in spite of her struggles. I have a lovely photo of myself wrapped in geese bent over for one of Pearl's kisses. That was last October. She retrieved ten of them one right after the other from a weed choked slough (including two at once!). I think those were her last geese. Pearl carried herself cherfully and without complaint right to the end. I miss her.

Hello OH! Good to hear from you, but sad to have it be such bad news. I always enjoyed your stories of Pearl. My chessie, Tess, is 12, and the uneasy, unspoken reality of that fact is beginning to weigh on my mind. Inevitability is, well, inevitable, but that doesn't make it any less shitty when it actually happens.

Thanks. My 7 year-old lab Opal seems to have developed some lameness in her front end, off and on. I expect she may have to be phased out of hunting soon. Too bad. She is super intense in the field, especially for uplands. My little 3 year-old French Brittany only recently started retrieving consistently. The two big dogs dominated that aspect, though the little gal would usually do okay if I hunted her alone. She is absolutely fantastic hunting pheasants in Montana! And tons of personality too. I am already lined up for another black lab pup from a litter out of a big black male owned by my French Brittany's breeder in North Dakota. He is a really fine dog. This is the third litter with the local yellow lab and all the pups have been super. I would have been content with just the two dogs but am uncertain if Opal will be hunting much longer. Gad, my house is so small. I hope the new girl doesn't turn out to be as big as her dad (100 lbs).

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About Me

Chad Love is a full-time freelance writer/photographer whose work has appeared in a number of publications, a few of which even paid him. But not much.
Along the way Chad has won awards from the Associated Press, the Society of Professional Journalists, the International Regional Magazine Association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation and the Oklahoma Wildlife Federation.